[J]ust such a wind had blown in the days of Ryurik and in the time of Ivan the Terrible and Peter [the Great], and … there had been just the same desperate poverty and hunger, the same thatched roofs with holes in them, ignorance, misery, the same desolation around, the same darkness, the same feeling of oppression—all these had existed, did exist, and would exist, and the lapse of a thousand years would make life no better.
He comes upon two widowed peasant women, a mother and her daughter, who live in an almshouse. They are sitting by a bonfire in the garden, washing up their bowls and spoons, and he joins them to warm his frozen hands by their fire. They tell him they have been to a Bible meeting—professional news for a naive young theologian. He holds out his hands to the fire and to profit by the occasion he says, “At just such a fire the Aposde Peter warmed himself … so it must have been cold then, too.” And then he is impelled to remind them, almost as gossip, of how, little by little, Saint Peter had denied Christ three times before the Crucifixion. And as he goes on, earnestly bringing to life that faraway time, he notices that the older woman is moved to sob “as though ashamed of her tears,” and that the young woman, who had in her time been beaten to a state of stupidity by her husband, has become tense like “someone enduring intense pain.” The student leaves them, pleased at first by his skill in bringing to present life an old story, and then he begins to wonder why the woman wept.
[It was] not because he could tell the story touchingly … but because her whole being was interested in what was passing in Peter’s soul. And joy suddenly stirred in his soul, and he even stopped for a minute to take breath. The past, he thought, is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another … when he touched one end the other quivered … that truth and beauty which had guided human life there in the garden and in the yard of the high priest had continued without interruption to this day and had evidently always been the chief thing in human life and in all earthly life, indeed; and the feeling of youth, health, vigour—he was only twenty-two—and the inexpressible sweet expectation of happiness, took possession of him little by little, and life seemed to him enchanting, marvelous and full of lofty meaning.
Chapter Eleven
The summers at Melikhovo were delectable, but the winters were severe. By 1893, when he was thirty-three, Chekhov was still slaving half the week at the book on Sakhalin, which was being serialized in the “thick journal” Russian Thought, and the rest of the week working on the stories. There were exhausting trips to Moscow and Petersburg, where he restlessly “feasted,” as he said, with his friends. There was a price: he returned with what he called bronchitis caused, he said, by smoking cigars. He gave them up. He groaned about his debts and added to the work in hand his official duties as sanitary inspector of the hospitals of his region and on the zemstvo, the local council. He had become deeply depressed and talked wildly of going abroad—to South Africa, Japan and India—more precisely, of joining Tolstoy’s son Leo on a trip to the World’s Fair in Chicago! Nothing came of these dreams of travel. One reason for his depression, his brother Alexander said after a querulous visit to Melikhovo, was that he was shut up in the tedious company of his father and his simple mother, with whom he had nothing in common. Alexander said, “What sense is there in letting the A la Tremontanas devour your soul the way the rats devour candles.” (This absurd word was the nickname the sons had given their father.) Alexander begged his brother to give up the dream of idyllic peace of country life. Anton listened and said nothing. He had become notoriously an apparent listener who, even in more exciting company than Alexander’s, was given to uttering apparently irrelevant yet gnomic or fantastic comments that killed the subject. He had once interrupted a wrangling discussion of Marxism with the eccentric suggestion: “Everyone should visit a stud farm. It is very interesting,” as if his mind were wandering. Was the remark so irrelevant? Chekhov’s apparent perversities were sly. The peace of country life? The industrial revolution had seeped in here and there into the country around Melikhovo. As a doctor Chekhov saw disturbing instances of a new sickness. The traditional idle landowners and the ignorant peasants were being replaced by a new race: the factory owners, enterprising and ruthless men from the towns.
Chekhov’s concern at first is with the lives of the wives and daughters of the rich manufacturers whose homes are attached to the factory sites. His impressions are those of a doctor and are diagnoses. In A Doctor’s Visit we hear the hellish noises of the factory and are told of the boring, squalid lives of the workers. The industrial dust lies on the leaves of the lilac trees near the factory. Chekhov is a man for sounds. We hear the metallic banging made by the watchmen to warn off intruders, we sense the military nature of the organization. We see the third-rate oil paintings and terrible chandeliers of the factory owner’s house. The husband has died, but his widow lives fretfully on, tarnished by a dreary life; her daughter is on the point of a nervous breakdown. She is isolated in the home, emotionally starved, and is ruled by the classic greedy governess who is “in heaven” because she can now eat food and drink wine that were beyond her means before she took the job.
In the long story A Woman’s Kingdom there is a variation of the factory theme. Here a woman has inherited an iron works from her uncle. Although her father was his brother’s heir, he was kept “in the position of a workman [and] paid … sixteen rubles a month,” so the woman had grown up as the daughter of a “simple workman.” She hates the falsity of her new position and bitterly regrets leaving her class. Chekhov admired the novels of Zola, though, unlike Zola, he is never melodramatic. Chekhov is the doctor examining the moral sickness of industrial life, and his style remains quietly concerned and expository. He is never lush or theatrical.
He now turns to the commercial aspect of industrialism in Three Years, the chronicle of the Laptev family, whose founder has come up to Moscow from the provinces and becomes a millionaire. He makes his money in wholesale haberdashery, buying cheap, selling dear and keeping the wages of his large staff down. The father is a miserable fellow, sentimental and pious in family life, but an “Asiatic despot” in his huge warehouse. The firm is probably drawn from the one in which Chekhov’s father had been humbly employed after his flight as a bankrupt from Taganrog. The staff are obliged to “live in”; they take all their meals in the canteen; they are marched en masse to church on Sundays and old Laptev shrewdly controls them by trading on their anxieties.
Bonuses were given to all the clerks every year, but privately, so that the man who got little was bound from vanity to say he had got more…. Nothing was strictly forbidden, and so the clerks never knew what was allowed, and what was not.